body acceptance

And it’s that last one that really irks me: that most people — and especially most women’s — new year’s resolutions center on dieting and weight loss as the key to happiness.

My weight doesn’t make me something less, but something more: a beautiful woman.

So here I am in my “today” body.

And it’s that last one that really irks me: that most people — and especially most women’s — new year’s resolutions center on dieting and weight loss as the key to happiness.

But I was yet to face the cold, hard fact that my lack of acceptance for my own body, was really a lack of acceptance for all the bodies I had falsely embraced for so long. Could I really love someone else’s ample stomach, when I could not love my own?

Before I became a haunted house performer, I thought having my face touched was one of the creepiest things imaginable. But it wasn't the eerie set music or the beheaded baby dolls that changed my definition of scary. It was what went on in the green room.

In 2007, Kate Harding wrote, "I’ve noticed that a lot of the people I see writing confidently and persuasively about body acceptance are married or in solid long-term relationships… my god, it is hard to develop that confidence when you’re single and not happy about it, and the whole world is telling you the way to fix that is to make yourself prettier — and, of course, that a crucial component of becoming prettier is becoming as thin as you can possibly be, by any means necessary."

I would wonder if others saw me as “super healthy” or as a “fit chick” — or if they had those thoughts at all. I was constantly consumed with every minute detail of my lifestyle, wondering if it was going to take me closer or further away from my ideal body.